Sermon, Sunday, 15 March 2009

<--Image to the left is Christ Expelling the Moneychangers from the Temple, by Giovanni Bernardi. It is engraved rock crystal and was created c. 1540-1549. It is from the National Gallery of Art.


John 2:13-22

This passage from John is a real grabber, isn’t it? It’s a story that just jumps out at you, doesn’t it? It’s one almost anyone who’s even just glanced through the gospels remembers. It’s a real story, with excitement and passion.

Most of the stories of Jesus that we remember admittedly tend to be fairly passive. Most of the time the Jesus we encounter and remember is teaching...or discussing...or healing (which, I acknowledge, would be an important event to those healed, but you must confess there’s not a lot of pep or action in those accounts). The Jesus we remember is the cut-out, flannel board Jesus of the Sunday school rooms of decades past. We’d find that Jesus standing or sitting. Maybe even walking. But certainly never doing anything that might cause him to break a sweat.

This Jesus though...this Jesus we encounter in the Temple in Jerusalem is the action figure Jesus...in the league of G.I. Joe and any Rambo spin offs toys; not the cut-out, flat, uninspiring cut-out flannel-board Jesus. This Jesus wreaked havoc...in the Temple of all places. This Jesus--dare I say it?--got angry...teed off...hot under the collar! He was out and out indignant and infuriated and didn’t mind showing it.

I don’t know about you, but I seem to have the impression that white Protestants don’t do that. We generally don’t do the ‘A’ word. And if we do, we certainly don’t show it. We’re not supposed to, at least. It might offend someone. It might be upsetting. It might cause that other word we don’t say...conflict.

But there Jesus is...flailing about like a man gone mad with a bunch of cords he’s using as a whip, upsetting tables, causing everything to go helter-skelter, ruining a good day’s business for a bunch of people, and really frightening some livestock who were peaceably chewing their cuds just moments before.

The Gospel writer John places this account early in his record of Jesus’ life and ministry. We find it in the second half of chapter two only. John’s first chapter begins with the well-known hymn or poem which starts, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” He then introduces us to John the Baptist and gets Jesus all baptized and ready for his ministry. John ends the first chapter with Jesus calling his first disciples.

Then we find our way into chapter two. RIght off, Jesus performs his first miracle; a very public one, at a wedding feast in which he, goaded by his mother, turns water into wine. Immediately, John reminds us that Jesus is divine and can do things that mortals cannot do. After a respite with his family and disciples in Capernaum, Jesus then ventures to Jerusalem at the time of the Passover feast. And right away he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work upsetting not only tables, but local religious big-wigs too undoubtedly.

If you stop to think about John’s narration and location of this event where he placed it and know anything about Jesus’ life, something might sound just a little odd to you. There’s a good reason for that; the Synoptic Gospels, otherwise known as Matthew, Mark, & Luke, all locate Jesus in Jerusalem just one single time...the week at the end of his ministry and life when he is arrested and crucified. Those three all include this Temple clearing account but it is late in their accounts. John, however, has Jesus in Jerusalem four times throughout his gospel; three of those during the Passover festival, as today’s reading was. In our minds, being more familiar as most of us are with the synoptics‘ versions, we have Jesus wandering about the Judean countryside for a few years and finally showing up in Jerusalem in time for that final week that we know so well.

John’s gospel in all likelihood was the last of the four gospels written. It’s a latecomer to the whole story-of-Jesus’-life game. Compared to the other three, he has different emphases and reasons for putting his work together. By the time that John composed these words, the early Christian movement or community was probably very different than the others knew. There were those by this point who were claiming that Jesus was only spirit, not flesh. It was Jesus’ divinity that was important to these folks and they denied the fact that he was truly human. Among other aims, John seeks to dispel that notion.

Of course, having an anger-showing, table-heaving, whip-wielding Jesus certainly goes a long way to that end. Jesus was human, John says right off, leaving no doubts or questions. Even though John’s gospel is less gritty in some ways and is more poetic, it does not equivocate when it comes to putting forth both Jesus’ divine and human natures.

And so, here we are two thousand years or so later, facing this angry, very human Jesus and we’re not exactly sure what to do with him, are we? We can happily handle the Jesus who welcomes children, cures lepers, and even hangs out with prostitutes. That Jesus, that flat, flannel-board Jesus of Sunday schools across many miles and years is easy to take...though, you’ve got to concede, really rather bland.

If we are going to embrace Jesus; if we are really going to claim that we are a follower of the Nazarene born of Mary; if we are truly willing to confess that Jesus holds a claim on us and our lives; if we are going to do those things, then we have to accept the anger that Jesus exhibited in that Temple along with the niceties that are usually ascribed to him. If we don’t, we’re in the same camp as those early followers who wanted to mask Jesus’ humanity and make him purely spirit whom John was working hard to prove wrong.

The good news is that this human Jesus is much more interesting. This is a Jesus I can talk about with others. This is a Jesus who knows and understands my anger and my tears and my frustration with the powers I encounter in my world, in my country, in my state, in my church.

I can bring this Jesus to those who find themselves at the margins because this is a Jesus still angry that more and more people do not have access to clean drinking water. I can envision Jesus storming into denominational gatherings and demanding a place at the Table for all. Jesus, I know, would be at city halls, state capitals, and legislatures and palaces around the globe demanding that attention be paid to the least of these.

Because John took the care that he did as he composed and crafted his gospel account to place this account right at the start of Jesus’ ministry, having just established Jesus’ divine nature through the water-into-wine moment, John can carry that anger and humanity of Jesus through the rest of the teachings and sayings that he writes about. We can read the rest of John’s gospel through that lens and it leaves us a little on edge because we don’t know when and if this guy will go off again.

We who claim to be followers of Jesus cannot be reminded enough that we are Christ’s body; a living, breathing, and even sometimes angry body. Our anger is holy anger; modeled after the one who cleared the Temple because it had become something far from a place of worship. Unlike the calm, placid demeanor of those good Protestant forebears who taught us to never raise our voices, we need to claim and own our holy anger. Turn the tables in the places where you know Jesus would do the same, because you are Christ’s body.